Neolithic

The Neolithic produced the earliest large religious architecture anywhere, and it did so before writing, before metal and in several cases before farming was fully established. Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia has enclosures of massive carved T shaped pillars raised by people who were still substantially hunting and gathering, which reverses the older assumption that surplus agriculture had to come first and monuments afterwards.

E. B. Banning has challenged part of the standard reading, arguing that the enclosures may have been roofed buildings used by households rather than temples in any exclusive sense, and the dispute is instructive because it turns on how a religious building is recognised at all when no text says so. Elsewhere the forms differ.

The passage tombs of Ireland and Orkney align on particular sunrises or sunsets, the stone circles of Britain and Brittany define enclosed spaces without roofs, and the temples of Malta are built to a repeated plan with carved altars and figures. Heart of Neolithic Orkney, inscribed by UNESCO in 1999, groups a settlement, a chambered tomb and two stone circles precisely because the religious and the domestic cannot be separated there.

No Neolithic person left a statement of belief, so every religious claim about the period is read off objects. That is worth saying at the front of any account, because Neolithic religion has attracted more confident reconstruction than almost any other subject in prehistory. Figurines have been interpreted as goddesses, as toys, as portraits and as teaching aids; burials have been read as ancestor cult, as status display and as practical disposal; alignments have been read as calendars, as theology and as coincidence.

Bioarchaeological work at Catalhoyuk by Clark Spencer Larsen and colleagues shows what a rigorous approach can actually establish, which is a great deal about health, diet, mobility and labour, and rather less about what anyone thought. The period is also not a period in the ordinary sense. It is defined by a way of living, farming with polished stone tools and without metal, so it begins and ends thousands of years apart in different regions, and a date range for it is only meaningful once a region is specified. The atlas gives a wide range and says so plainly, rather than implying a single global era with a single religion in it. What is catalogued under the Neolithic here should be read the same way: they are contemporaneous only in the loosest sense, and a monument in Anatolia and a monument in Orkney belong to societies that had no contact with each other and no reason to think alike.